Russian Statehood: The Authorities and Society during the Twentieth
Century

After receiving letters of
interest from scholars across the Atlantic
world, St. Petersburg State University's Faculty History would like to
issue a final call for papers for the international research conference
“Russian Statehood: The Authorities and Society during the Twentieth
Century” to be held in St. Petersburg, Russia on 30-31 May 2013.

This
idea builds off of the Faculty’s prior success hosting an international
conference in October 2010 dedicated to the study of late Stalinism and
the epoch of N.S. Khrushchev and it hopes to, within the parameters of
this future conference, continue its scientific dialogue with historians
from different countries who also study Russia’s contemporary history.

The creation and development of the Russian
state remain
questions of great importance even as they have been studied in many
ways by Russian historians and their foreign colleagues. Already this
year (2012), the attention of scientific circles within the Russian
Federation has been drawn to the 1150th anniversary of the birth of the
Russian state. Now, research is set to continue in 2013—a meaningful
year if ever there was one for this area of knowledge. Four hundred
years ago began the rule of Romanovs which to significant extent
determined the particularities of Russia’s subsequent development as a
state. The year 2013 should also attract the attention of historians for
it was 100 years ago that a period of relatively stable growth ended
and the First World War and Bolshevik Revolution brought a new era of
development for Russia.

The conference’s
Organizing Committee invites you to take part in the discussion of
questions that remain hotly debated especially as the Russian Federation
continues to experience developments connected to the ongoing formation
of a new form of statehood. This conference has already received
support from the St. Petersburg City Government’s Committee for External
Ties as well as the B.N. Yeltsin Presidential Library. During the
conference’s proceedings, the Organizing Committee hopes to examine the
following “blocks” of problems:

1. Russia’s revolutions and
wars of the 20th and 21st Centuries
2. Transformations of the
political system, the economy, and society
3. Problems building a
nation-state and the collapse of states
4. Issues involving culture
including relationships between the intelligentsia, the
authorities, and the people

The language of the conference is Russian.
Those scholars
selected to present at the conference may elect to have the Organizing
Committee translate their presentations from their language of choice to
Russian in the months prior to the conference’s taking place. The
articles off of which these presentations are based may also be
translated into Russian if they are selected for publication in a
conference compendium to appear at a later date.

The Organizing Committee plans to take upon itself the costs of
two-nights lodging plus breakfast for those scholars selected to
participate in the conference.

Post-doctoral and Doctoral Fellowships in
Russian and East European Studies
The Israeli Inter-University Academic Partnership in Russian and East European
Studies is offering a small number of highly competitive postdoctoral and
doctoral fellowships in the field of Russian and East European Studies for the
2013-2014 academic year. These fellowships are offered to researchers across
many disciplines in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences (broadly
defined), and will be awarded on the basis of academic excellence.

Postdoctoral fellowships are offered to young scholars who have received their
PhD degree no earlier than 2006 and no later than June 2013. Postdoctoral
fellows will be awarded 92,500 NIS per year (equivalent to approximately
$25,000). These grantees will be required to present two public lectures at
their host institution during the fellowship year. In some cases, the
fellowships will entail a teaching commitment at the host university.
The Partnership also offers fellowships for doctoral students who are
registered in one of its partner universities (Bar-Ilan University, Ben Gurion
University of the Negev, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv
University, University of Haifa) provided that the applicant commenced his/her
degree no earlier than the 2005-2006 academic year. Doctoral fellows will
receive a yearly stipend of 46,250 NIS (equivalent to approximately $12,500).
The fellows will be selected by an international academic committee and then
placed in one of the partner universities. Fellows may apply for one additional
year of funding.
Applicants are requested to submit their curriculum vitae (no longer than four
pages), a detailed statement of current research interests (up to 2000 words),
one writing sample (no longer than 25 pages) and two letters of recommendation
(to be submitted directly by the recommenders by e-mail). All materials must be
submitted in English and state clearly whether the application refers to a
doctoral OR postdoctoral fellowship. In addition, applicants must state if they
are applying for other sources of funding for the fellowship period.

Application deadline: January 27, 2013.
Please send application materials by e-mail in PDF/DOC/DOCX format to iuap@post.tau.ac.il with CC to crees@post.tau.ac.il.
Subject: Postdoctoral and Doctoral Fellowships in Russian and East European
Studies

For the fourth consecutive year, the Medici Archive Project will offer
a 12-week Online Paleography Course. The course is designed to furnish
participants with basic skills for reading historical manuscript
materials from the late 15th-17th-century Tuscany. This course also
offers a general introduction to the nature of Italian archives. From
personal letters to the inventories and wills, the digitized documents
used to train the course’s participants in paleographic skills will
also expose them to a wide range of document types useful for scholarly
research.
Enrollment will be limited to 20 students. Priority will be given to
graduate students, post-graduate scholars, and professionals with
relevant scholarly interests. Basic knowledge of Italian is required.
The course is taught in English.

The online course will be held from Monday, February 4 to Friday, April
26, 2013. The tuition for this course is US $ 500, payable by PayPal
upon
acceptance.

To apply, send: 1. A brief letter of introduction explaining the
motivation for taking the course. 2. A curriculum vitae that details
linguistic aptitude and (if applicable) archival experience.All
materials should be sent to Dr. Elena Brizio, ebrizio@medici.org by
January 12, 2013.

For the third consecutive year, the Medici Archive Project will be
offering a two-week intensive seminar on archival research especially
intended for advanced graduate students in Renaissance and early modern
studies. This seminar will be team-taught by current MAP staff. Course
participants will have the opportunity to work directly with original
documents and will visit a number of Florentine archives.

The seminar aims to teach scholars to navigate Italian archives (with
particular emphasis on Florentine collections), to examine in depth
various document typologies, to read the documents, to identify
paleographic conventions, and to apply this research to their scholarly
pursuits. Class-size is restricted to twelve, so that each participant
will receive personal guidance.

The seminar will run from Monday, June 10 to Saturday, June 22, 2013.

The tuition for this course is US $ 700, payable by PayPal upon
acceptance.

For further information, or to apply, contact Dr. Elena Brizio
[ebrizio@medici.org].
To apply, please send a CV and a brief statement
explaining how this course will benefit your current research project
by May 1, 2013.

============= Post-Secularism: Between Public
Reason and Political Theology

In recent years, leading philosophers, including Jürgen Habermas, Charles
Taylor, and or John D. Caputo, have criticized “old-style” secularism and
proposed instead a post-secular model for understanding the
relation of
religion and democracy, faith and reason. There are however profound
theoretical and practical divergences in the post-secular models proposed.
First, what are the precise characteristics of post-secularism as a
philosophical alternative? In what sense could it be said to break with
secularism? Second, what are the practical political and legal
consequences of adhering a post-secular approach? From a critical
theoretical perspective, Habermas focuses on a revised concept of public
reason and deliberation in promoting an active interaction of democracy
and religion. From a hermeneutical perspective, Taylor’s recent work
centres on the new “conditions of belief” and the dilemmas inherent to
both religious and atheist experience. In contrast, Caputo and Richard
Kearney develop a Derridean aporetic understanding of the nexus of
democracy and religion, faith and reason, whereas Hent de Vries, William
Connolly and Simon Critchley reject Habermas’s rationalist approach and
propose a distinct understanding of post-secularism by focusing on
Schmit’‘s and Benjamin’s re-appropriation of the tenets of Saint Paul in
their political-theological works. Although these trends have been studied
to some extent, there has been no sustained attempt so far to subject them
to a comparative analysis that would more fully address the issue of
“post-secularism.”

Our “Call for Papers” invites scholars to submit a study, with a
comparative dimension, that addresses both the philosophical import and
the practical-political effects of the post-secular alternative. The work
of the following authors will be at the centre of our proposed special
issue: Habermas, Taylor, Caputo, Critchley, Connolly, Gianni Vattimo,
Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Comparative studies that focus on various religious traditions (Christian,
Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, etc.) and theologians, and those that
focus on the public role of religion in democracy (e.g., Rawls, Weithman,
Wolterstorff) are particularly welcome.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Significance and varieties of post-secularism
- Open secularity, post-secularism or political theology?
- Deliberative post-secularism or political liberalism
- Post-secularism: religious imagination and practice
(Christian, Islamic,
Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, etc.)
- Discussion of (legal, moral or political) practical
cases from a
post-secular perspective
- Is political theology useful for re-thinking democracy?
- Varieties of political theology today
- Re-thinking the legacy of Saint Paul
- Visions of sovereignty: between proceduralism and
political theology
- Faith: religious? secular?
- Post-secularism and feminism
- The state of exception between deliberation and
political decision
- Rethinking solidarity from a postsecular perspective

The problem of human knowledge – what a person employs to interpret and act on the world – has been in the centre of scholarly attention for a long time. Knowledge is shaped by culture and distributed in population in certain ways; anthropological research has been directed to the distribution of knowledge – its presence or absence in particular persons – and the social processes influencing these distributions. Attention has been paid in particular to so-called folk knowledge consisting of beliefs and socially accepted rules corresponding to various spheres of life: social relations, natural environment, reasoning and emotions, economic relations, oral tradition, etc. These beliefs and rules are shared and adapted to the particular local settings. Theoretical debates focused on the models of natural and cultural environment in particular social and cultural conditions, and the impact that those models have on human behaviour.

The aim of this conference is to contribute to this focus by bringing together scholars doing research in different cultural settings. A comparative perspective on human knowledge allows us to unravel a number of aspects of the cultural worlds which people construct. Empirical research can demonstrate how established thoughts, representations, and social relations to a considerable extent configure and filter individual human experience of the world around us and thereby generate culturally diverse worldviews which might include feelings and attitudes as well as information, embodied skills, verbal taxonomies and concepts: all the ways of understanding that humans use to make up a reality.

We invite interested scholars and students to submit proposals for papers which will explore: • Folk knowledge and expert knowledge • Material culture: material objects and their cultural meanings • Religious beliefs and rituals • Concepts of ethnicity and race • Social learning: acquisition of knowledge by children and adults • Children and their concepts • Verbal concepts and models • Taxonomy of concepts • Representations of morality • Gender relationships and representations • Representations of economic relations and processes • Visual representations: construction of meanings

Prof. Anthony Good Anthony Good is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the School of Social & Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Great Britain. The lecture: Folk Knowledge and the Law

Prof. John Eade John Eade is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton and former Executive Director of CRONEM (Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism) which links Roehampton and the University of Surrey. He is also Visiting Professor at the Migration Research Unit, the University College London, Great Britain. The lecture: Contested Knowledges: The Politics of Pilgrimage in a Changing Europe

Dr. William (Lee) W. McCorkle William McCorkle is Director of Experimental Research at the LEVYNA (Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion and Ritual). He is Associate Professor and Research Specialist at the Department for the Study of Religions, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. The lecture: From Compulsion to Script: The Evolution of Ritual and the Rise of Religions

Submission details: The language of the conference will be English only. The papers should last no more than 20 minutes. Abstracts (up to 350-words in Word doc.), with contact details and affiliation, should be sent to the conference e-mail address (uet.conference@savba.sk) by 31st January 2013. You will be informed about acceptance or non-acceptance of your proposal by 15th February 2013.

Conference participation fee: • scholars who will present their papers: € 50; • PhD students who will present their papers: € 25; • participants who will not present papers: free. The participation fee includes all conference proceedings and daytime refreshments. Accommodation is not included in the conference fee.

Theme: Cultures between History and Ideology Publication: Interculturality Date: No. 5 (2013) Deadline: 1.2.2013We are preparing the March issue of "Interculturality", a magazine for the promotion and affirmation of intercultural communication. The general theme of this issue is: Cultures between history and ideology. Deadline for submitting articles is February 1st, 2013. Please find instructions for authors enclosed in the attachment. We are once again looking forward to receiving your articles.

We kindly ask authors to submit their manuscripts and other enclosures in electronic form to the Editorial's Office e-mail address <zkvrazvoj@nscable.net>, prepared in the following way:

1. General Guidelines

Manuscripts should be written in Latin using font Times New Roman, font size 12, line spacing 1.5, on an A4 paper.

Each manuscript, if deemed as a contribution to The Intercultural Research, should contain the information about the author of the text: first and last names, full name and place of the institution where the author is employed, or a name of the institution where the author has completed his research (for more complex organizations a complete hierarchy is given i.e. University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy – Department of Serbian Literature, Novi Sad), a title, an abstract in Serbian and English (no more than 250 words long), key words (no more than 7 in Serbian as well as in English), the text and a reference list. The text should not be more than 24 computer pages long, whereas 16 pages is the minimum. If the manuscript is intended for Views (essays, research papers) it should contain an abstract in Serbian and English (no more than 250 words long) and a reference list, while the scope of the text may be between 10 and 24 computer pages.

2. References

- The titles of the works should be in italics.

- When cited or referred to in the text, the source should be given in the following way: in brackets, author's last name, the year of publication, colon and page number. But, in the reference list it should be given with all the information.

- In the reference list, when monographic publication is concerned, the author's last and first names, the title of the text in italics, place, publisher and the year of publication are cited. In the reference list, when serial publication is concerned, the the author's last and first names, the title of the text inside the quotation marks, the name of the serial publication in italics, the number of book or chapter, (year and full date), colon followed by the page numbers of the text. The texts retrieved from the internet are cited in the following way: monographic publications: the author's last and first names, the title in italics, the internet address from which the text was retrieved, the date of access. Periodical publications: the author's last name, the title of the text inside the quotation marks, the title of periodical publication in italics, number and date of publication (if it is not included in the internet address), the internet address, the date of access.

- In the reference list, bibliographic units should be written in language and letter in which they have been published, enlisted in alphabetical order.

- Footnotes are given at the bottom of the page and are used for additional comments. Continuous numbering is marked with Arabic numerals form 1 further on, followed by the punctuation mark.

- Foreign names and terms undergo transcription which is adjusted to Serbian language (according to Serbian Orthography), but when a foreign name or term is mentioned for the first time, the original form is given in the brackets as well. When mentioned next time in the text, it should be consistently and identically transcribed, without mentioning the original form. The exceptions are latin terms, which are left in the original form. When foreign phrases are cited, the translation should be given in corresponding footnote.

Photographs which the authors enclose with their papers should be sent as high-resolution photographs in .jpeg or .tiff format with the author's signature and the year of making.

Note: Papers published in the journal shall not be reprinted neither in parts or as a whole, without the the publisher's prior consent. Manuscripts are reviewed and are not given back to the authors.

Structure of the Journal

We ask the authors to adjust their manuscripts to the thematic and formal structure of the journal, as well as to specify for which column they are written.

Tibor Vajda, Director of the Institute for Culture of Vojvodina Aleksandra Đurić Bosnić, Editor of the "Interculturality" magazine Email: zkvrazvoj@nscable.net

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MEDIEVAL SLAVIC SUMMER INSTITUTE At the Hilandar Research Library, The Ohio State University June 24-July 19, 2013

Deadline for receipt of application: 22 February 2013.

NOTE: The Sixth Annual Hilandar Conference will be held in Columbus, Ohio, immediately following the end of the MSSI, July 19-21, 2013.

The Hilandar Research Library (HRL), the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies (RCMSS), and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures (DSEELC) at The Ohio State University will host a four-week intensive Summer Institute for qualified graduate students in Columbus, Ohio, 24 June-19 July, 2013. The Medieval Slavic Summer Institute (MSSI) will offer: Practical Slavic Palaeography (Slavic 814) and Readings in Church Slavonic (Slavic 812). All lectures will be in English.

Manuscript material on microform from the Hilandar Research Library's extensive holdings forms a large part of the lectures and exercises. There is also a program of lectures on related topics, and other activities. Time permitting, participants may have the opportunity to work with their own individualized research on manuscript collections/materials found in the HRL.

Applicants must be graduate students with a BA degree and with a reading knowledge of Cyrillic and of at least one Slavic language. Preference will be given to applicants with reading knowledge of Old Church Slavonic or some other pre-modern Slavic language.

The Hilandar Research Library, the largest repository of medieval Slavic Cyrillic texts on microform in the world, includes the holdings from over 100 monastic, private, museum, and library collections of twenty-three countries. There are over 6000 Cyrillic manuscripts on microform in the HRL, as well as over 1000 Cyrillic early pre-1800 printed books on microform. The holdings range from the eleventh to twentieth centuries, with a particularly strong collection of manuscripts from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. About half of the manuscripts are East Slavic, with much of the remainder South Slavic in provenience.

For further information on eligibility, credit, housing, financial aid, and to obtain an application to the MSSI, please contact the HRL and RCMSS at hilandar@osu.edu or the Hilandar Research Library and the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies, 119 Thompson Library, 1858 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210-1286.

Call for papers International Workshop Photography and Visual Orders in the History of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Photographs are two-dimensional simplifications of a four-dimensional reality; they often possess a greater power of suggestion than the natural visual sensation. This, along with their technical reproducibility, explains the rise of photography to one of the most important everyday representations of people, places, and events since the late 19th century. It seems logical to search for the symbolic orders in and behind this new world of images (whether familial, political, or economic), as well as for their origins and medial transmission, and their producers and recipients. The workshop is organized in cooperation with the German Historical Institute Moscow and the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) "Threatened Orders" of Tübingen University and devotes itself to these topics using the example of Russian / Soviet History between 1840 and 1990. The purpose of this, first of all, is to lay down thematic guidelines for further research and to coordinate running projects.

The following four thematic fields will serve as starting point:

1) Method and Theory What contribution can photo-historical approaches and questions make to the study of both Russian and Soviet History, and to the study of (threatened) orders (also in a transnational context)? Orders are considered to be threatened according to the CRC-terminology, when options for action become insecure, patterns of behaviour and routines are called into question, and when a threat communication is established.

2) Images of the Other Photographs are considered to have a causal connection to reality. Therefore, they play a key role in visualising foreigners and foes. What strategies of inclusion, exclusion, defamation, or romanticization can be observed?

3) Ideas of Order Photojournalism, which was considered the most important genre of Soviet Photography since the end of the 1920s, visualised the ideals of the New Soviet person and his / her society. In this context, we are not only interested in how achievements in industrialization, space travel, or sports were represented by means of photography, but also if and in what context threats were visualized.

4) Practices, Techniques, Media What did the social and organizational infrastructure behind the worlds of images visualizing order and threat look like? Through which agents and media did their dissemination occur? How did amateurs apply or alter the official picture language? What motifs and presentation techniques were formative?

Interested scholars from all disciplines, who work on the History of Photography in Russia or the Soviet Union, please send a proposal for a talk (25 minutes, length: maximum 400 words) and a short CV until 28 February 2013 to Isabelle de Keghel (keghel@gmx.de).

Applications may be submitted in German, Russian or English. Conference Languages will be Russian and English (with simultaneous translation).

Proposals from the entire field of the History of Photography in Russia and the Soviet Union between 1840 and 1990 are welcome. Particular attention will be paid to the thematic fields mentioned above.

The number of speakers is limited to fifteen. Applicants will be notified of the chosen proposals by 30 March 2013.

The conference is funded by the GHI Moscow and the CRC 923 "Threatened Orders" of Tübingen University. The expenses on travel and accommodation will be covered by the organizers. A publication of selected articles is planned.

Funding for Doctoral Research in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Manchester

The University of Manchester is offering a range of awards to which candidates working on topics related to Russia and Eastern Europe are eligible to apply. The three main awards, which comprise a fee-bursary and a maintenance grant, are ESRC studentships in Language-Based Area Studies, AHRC studentships and the University-funded President's Doctoral Scholar awards.

1. The North West Doctoral Training Centre, jointly run by the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester, is offering 3 PhD studentships in Language-Based Area Studies, in fields which include Russian and East European Studies. This award covers home/EU fees and offers a maintenance grant. (Last year the value of the grant was £ 13,590.) Successful candidates will be based at the University of Manchester. The University has wide-ranging expertise in Russian and East European Studies with relevant members of staff based across the Faculty of Humanities, particularly in the School of Social Sciences and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. In 2008, Russian and East European Studies at Manchester was assessed in the UK's independent Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) as the best in the country for research in the field. We will be able to offer supervision on a wide range of topics on Russian and East European societies, politics and history. For description of the North West DTC and of the opportunities for post-graduate studies which it offers, please go to http://www.nwdtc.ac.uk/prospective.html The deadline for the application for the ESRC studentships is Monday 4 February, 2013. Please note that prior to this deadline you should apply for a place on the PhD programme in one of the two Schools mentioned above. The online application should be submit to the Schools by Thursday 17 January 2013. The choice of School will depend on the location of the member of staff you wish to be supervised by. For further information, please visit: http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/fees/postgraduate/ For informal inquiries, please contact either Dr Ewa Ochman, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, at ewa.ochman@manchester.ac.uk or Professor Yoram Gorlizki, School of Social Sciences, at yoram.gorlizki@manchester.ac.uk

2. The Department of Russian and East European Studies in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is keen to receive applications for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) award from candidates working on topics related to Russia and Eastern Europe. AHRC awards provide payment of tuition fees and a maintenance stipend for UK students, and tuition fees (and a maintenance stipend, subject to eligibility criteria) for EU students. Please note that you must have an offer of a place on an appropriate doctoral programme before you can be considered for an AHRC studentship in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. An online application for a place on a doctoral programme should be submitted to the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures by Friday 1 February 2013 at the latest; a completed funding application form must be received by the School by Friday 1 March 2013.

3. In 2011 the University of Manchester launched a new 2.5m investment in PhD training with the creation of the President's Doctoral Scholar Awards. These awards are open to all new PhD students from all nationalities and research areas. The Department of Russian and East European Studies in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures is keen to receive applications for this funding scheme from candidates working on topics related to Russia and Eastern Europe. The award covers tuition fees (home/EU or international, as appropriate) and the equivalent of the research council stipend (£13, 590 in 2012-13). The following application deadlines should be observed in relation to this award: An application for a place on a doctoral programme should be submitted to the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures by Friday 1 February 2013 at the latest; a completed funding application form should be submitted by Friday 1 March 2013. For full details of the 2013 competitions and guidance notes on how to apply, please visit: http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/fees/postgraduate/ For informal inquiries about the academic side of the application process, please contact: Dr Ewa Ochman ewa.ochman@manchetser.ac.uk For questions about the administrative side of the application process, please contact: Ms Rachal Corbishley at Rachel.Corbishley@manchester.ac.uk